Paul Dirac’s PhD thesis

I cannot resist posting this link to Paul Dirac’s handwritten notes for his PhD thesis – the first ever written on quantum mechanics: http://academia.edu/323246/PhD_Thesis_of_Paul_Dirac .

It was launched into the twittersphere by Dirac’s biographer Graham Farmelo (@grahamfarmelo).

Paul Dirac was one of the great physicists of the twentieth century and this thesis was one of his great contributions.  The Dirac Equation is one of the building blocks of modern physics and leads directly to prediction of the existence of antimatter. In 1933, aged only thirty-one, Dirac shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Erwin Schroëdinger “for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory”.

He was an interesting character: the Wikipedia entry on him is worth a read.